Problems Concerning First Principles

its successor might be. Although the very learned Morelli denies this. Be that as it may, the passage περὶ μεθέξεως concerning participation and the following passage, where Damascius progressed to the degrees of intelligible things, has been lost. The learned reader will judge this matter when this book is published, which I hope will be soon. The aforementioned gap can be supplied to some extent from Proclus’s seven books on Plato’s Parmenides, which our Damascius, as is observed in several manuscript Codices, brought to an end. However, this commentary on the Parmenides by Damascius, if it is indeed the one that continued Proclus’s unfinished work, is entirely different in kind from the ἀπορίαις καὶ λύσεσιν Difficulties and Solutions on Plato’s Parmenides ⁸).

8. Suidas, under the entry Δαμάσκιος Damascius, testifies that our author wrote several commentaries on Plato: ὑπομνήματα εἰς Πλάτωνα commentaries on Plato. "The library of the renowned man Hurtado de Mendoza once possessed a commentary on the Parmenides, no. CXLV, inscribed as follows: Damascius, On First Principles, on the Parmenides; in which title I suspect an error of the omitted conjunction 'AND' (Iriarte speaks); for it is clearly a book distinct from the book περὶ ἀρχῶν On Principles. But that book on the Parmenides, together with this one, exists today bound in a single volume in Venice in the Greek Codices of the Library of St. Mark, 245 and 246." Cf. Morelli, ibid. But if that Mendoza commentary on the Parmenides contains the same argument as our Codex, in my opinion, it does not differ in the least from the book περὶ ἀρχῶν On Principles.

Proclus’s Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides exists in two Codices, No. XI and CDXXV, of the Munich Library. The very method of arguing and interpreting shows that the whole commentary was not written by one and the same person, but it is doubtful whether it was Damascius who completed it. By way of a specimen, I add here the beginning of the Exposition undertaken by Damascius, as they say.

"Consider then from the beginning: if the One exists, is it possible . . . . . . . . . . when one says in summary, that the One exists." (Plato, Parm. p. 142 B. C. Steph. § 32 Heind.) Damascius writes: "Parmenides attempts from both sides (concerning the One inserts Cod. B. 425) to show the power of dialectic; he begins from the extreme. For it was summarized from the arguments that it does not participate in being, and the One is nothing, as one believes by reason. For this is the risk: from where, once it is established again that it participates in being—insofar as 'it is' is attached to it—the rest will be established in the inverse manner. The argument is truly wonderful; for to proceed from what seem to be trivialities Cod. B. "to result" to the greatest things, while dissolving the proposed subject, is most appropriate, wishing..."